For the last four years, my wife and I have been broke business owners. We’ve scraped the bottom of our bank accounts while working odd jobs and trickling revenue streams to pay our house’s bills, never taking home a salary from our business.

When we were engaged, I bought my wife a large canvas for her birthday. She had been an avid painter through high school and college, but when I gave her that canvas, she was deep in the throes of student teaching, so she was too busy to do anything with it.

This morning began like most every morning. My wife and I lazily blinked awake around 830. We grabbed our phones and scrolled through the internet until our dog bugged us to go outside around ten. We ate a hearty breakfast of bacon, eggs, and avocado toast, took a walk, and opened our shop at noon.

Once upon a time, you would have found me glued to my phone, furiously typing out a response for one of the several political threads I was juggling on Facebook. Most of my timeline was either news stories or commentary on those stories. Many of those posts had as many as 300 comments a piece.

In our lives, there are moments in times that act like fulcrums. Huge, massive moments where the rest of our lives stop and pivot. Moments where a decision must be made, fully knowing that that decision will change everything.

Five years ago, my wife and I were working in a charter school. The school day ran from 8 to 5, and we were required to be there thirty minutes before and after. Ten hour days are enough to make any job unenjoyable. Add obstinate teenagers, a hefty take-home workload, and administrator politics that were always in…

It seems like every day, there’s a new study or op-ed coming out that promises to finally “decode” Millennials. What are they thinking? Why are they so unreliable and entitled? How can you get them to buy from your company?

Around this time every year, my social media feeds start blowing up with people talking about tax returns. And for a lot of my friends, it’s like second Christmas. They make big purchases. One of my friends bought a car this year. Last year, a couple used their return on a down payment for a house.